December was a month of list-making, weighing up the best films of 2015 in a variety of outlets and metrics. No amount of reconsideration, however, could knock 45 Years (Curzon, 15) from its perch as the year’s finest for me. Andrew Haigh’s slow-developing snapshot of a marriage falling into a late-life crevice is as simultaneously tender and brutal a relationship study as any in modern film, its stiff upper lip trembling and dashed with shaving cuts.
Well-to-do Norfolk retirees Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) plan their 45th anniversary celebrations under the cloud of resurrected tragedy from Geoff’s past: the discovery of a former girlfriend’s corpse from half a century ago. Haigh fashions their crisis neither as melodrama nor as kitchen-sink realism, but as ghost story, haunted not just by the spectre of an unwitting other woman, posthumously splintering a marriage in a cruel twist of time travel, but by those of the living, the former lives and buried selves of our partners that we never quite know. It’s performed like a dream, of course: Rampling and Courtenay play an immaculately synchronised duet of ache, watching each other through repeatedly refocused lenses throughout. A sustained shiver of a film, it will sit in your bones long past winter.
As fizzing with hormonal curiosity as 45 Years is wearied of desire, Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (eOne, 18) is fast, funny and more of a landmark than you might guess: a brave, vivid articulation of adolescent female sexuality that imposes no teacherly moral judgment on its protagonist’s most reckless erotic urges, even finding a kind of empowerment in error.
When 15-year-old San Francisco comic nerd Minnie (the vital British newcomer Bel Powley) initiates an affair with her mother’s deadbeat thirtysomething boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård), Heller’s camera neither endorses nor condemns – and certainly doesn’t soften – what ensues: for better or worse, a carnal and emotional education that will have parents and teens shielding their eyes even as they empathise.
Minnie’s diary certainly makes Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Fox, 12) – an insipid, twee-tastic, coming-of-age story to which Heller’s film unaccountably lost the top prizes at Sundance last year – look doubly anaemic by comparison. Filtering the misfortune of a leukaemia-stricken high schooler through the puny angst of a precocious classmate and aspiring film-maker with a vague crush on her, the film could be a frank study in typical teenage self-orientation – if any one character were more than a scriptwriter’s vessel for precious observations on love and art and the whole damn thing. As for Earl, a colourlessly black sidekick whose catchphrase is a mumbling appreciation of the dying girl’s “titties”, the less said the better.
African American masculinity gets a more vigorous shake in Straight Outta Compton (Universal, 18), F Gary Gray’s initially fiery but largely conventional account of west coast hip-hop giants NWA’s rise to fame and fatally fought-over fortune. Much has been rightly made of the film’s laundering of the legend – with Ice Cube and Dr Dre as producers, the group’s more egregious acts of violence and misogyny were never going to get much of a look-in – but even on those curtailed terms, this absorbing, spikily acted film finally disappoints, narratively prioritising internal contract disputes over their era-rumbling artistry. Its side-view on US police brutality still feels harshly of the moment, but NWA deserved a rougher, riskier portrait.
Taking a peppier view of corruption in the LA music business, We Are Your Friends (Studiocanal, 15) stars Zac Efron as a fresh-faced DJ chicly chewed up by the Hollywood party scene. Its story beats are as predictable as its musical ones are propulsive, but it’s shot and cut with sun-bleached energy and Efron’s easy charm carries it like a one-strapped rucksack.
There’s no such ease of presence among the pretty but dour ensemble of Gaspar Noé’s Love (Curzon, 18), which, contrary to its billing as a boundary-busting sextravaganza, emerges as a lugubrious critique of modern-day erotic mores. At one point, its American-in-Paris protagonist states his intent to make a movie about “sentimental sexuality” and Noé delivers on that promise: the sex itself, including one arresting vaginal-view shot of penetration, is bounteous, but hardly worth the puddly personal philosophising that surrounds it; without even the inventive use of 3D that distinguished the film in cinemas, it’s like a night spent lying in the wet patch.
On the classic front, Maurice Pialat’s underseen 1968 debut L’enfance nue gets Mubi.com’s 2016 selection off to a marvellous start. That Pialat remains better known for his later works often divorces him in film discussion from the French New Wave to which he was a late arrival, but François Truffaut was a producer on this hard but unflinchingly compassionate portrait of unmoored youth that acts as something of a reply, one decade on, to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. The reckless, unwanted 10-year-old at its centre is less immediately engaging than 400 Blows’ Antoine Doinel, but Pialat’s film is perhaps more concerned with the tentative sympathy the boy himself slowly finds for the outside world.
